This invention relates to a method and a device for physical verification and recognition between a calling party and a called party. It makes it possible to verify the existence of prior personal contacts before being connected. This authentication of a calling party is in particular intended for audiovisual communications by people with no knowledge of information technology and/or who do not have a computer. This invention also relates to a system for checking the connection identity between two people, irrespective of the technical means used for the connection.
There are many systems that allow at least two users, at a distance from each other, to communicate and exchange during a voice, video and/or text conversation. Many websites and Internet communications systems allow computer users to organize videoconferences by means of a digital camera, called “webcam”, a microphone or similar peripherals connected to these users' computers. All these instant messaging systems share the drawback of requiring the use of a computer for each user who wants to communicate with another user. These communications techniques are therefore not suitable for elderly persons or for people who have difficulties in using computers.
Using the conventional telephone network is also known as a way of realizing a video and voice conversation between several users. In this case, the various users who wish to take part in the conversation need only be equipped with relatively sophisticated telephones comprising a built-in camera and microphone and to perform the steps required by the telephone service provider to have access to this service.
One of the drawbacks of videoconference systems utilizing telephony networks is that it incurs a non-negligible cost to the calling party, compared to videoconferencing based on Internet technologies.
In any communications system, there is also the risk that third parties will send unsolicited messages, commonly called “spam” or “junk mail”, which, after having become a nuisance to e-mail users, are now expanding to the use of short messages (“SMS”), of telephony and of videotelephony.
Document US 2008209223 is known; as stated in its paragraph 1, it relates to the access security of a computer environment and more specifically to generating a visual recognition question to check that the user is a human being. The purpose of this document is therefore to prevent an automated system (“robot” or “bot”) from accessing a resource over the Internet. More specifically, this is about preventing optical character recognition from reading the glyphs in a frame whose position is known (see paragraph 39). In this security system, users are shown a single image, which represents a sequence of symbols (e.g. a secret code shared between the user and the authorization server) that has been distorted and placed in a variable position on a background, then the users are asked to recognize these symbols (see FIGS. 5 to 7, 11 and 14 to 20).
Traditionally, access to a resource or to a person is based on:                what the entity trying to gain access is:                    biometrics are used to recognize it automatically, which implies complex, expensive and low-reliability systems or            requesting the person to whom access is requested to recognize it by transmitting its image or voice, which implies disturbing this person;                        what the entity trying to gain access has in its possession, i.e. a physical medium or key, mechanical or electronic or        what the entity trying to gain access knows: it must agree a password with the person it wishes to have access to, which implies tediously remembering it.        
Thus, none of the traditional access authorization methods is suitable either for filtering out calls between relatives or for use by young children, elderly persons or persons with impaired faculties.
The document “DialByPhoto” by Tunji Afonja, (internet URL: http://www.gx-5.com/products/dialbyphotoforiphone/index_full.php, is known: it describes a means of selecting contacts based on their photograph. This device does not guarantee that the calling party knows the called party, i.e. is able to physically identify the called party. In particular, this system allows unsolicited calls to be made by using telephone numbers. In addition, randomly associating photos to telephone numbers to be called allows unsolicited calls to be made. For example, during a telephone prospection campaign, the absence of a relation between a photo and a telephone number does not change the operation of the system and does not makes it possible to protect the called parties from these unsolicited calls.